Mexican troops have recovered a stolen shipment of radioactive Cobalt-60 isotope, abandoned by truck thieves who face the risk of a slow lingering death from radiation poisoning.
A truck carrying a substantial quantity of the radioactive isotope Cobalt-60 from a hospital in Tijuana to a waste centre was robbed by armed bandits …

COMMENTS

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The wages of sin, and all that-

slow death...

When you read about the actual clinical consequence of radiation "poisoning", it is really very sad. I put poisoning in quotes since it is not a traditional chemical poison, but ionising radiation creating sufficinet double-stranded DNA breaks that outpace DNA repair metabolism.

Re: slow death...

Re: slow death...

How about considering their time line?

This happened Wednesday 4 Dec. The authorities say that exposure to the unshielded source will provide a fatal dose if the criminals were close enough, and estimate that a period of a few minutes to an hour would be needed for this. Assuming that they got a lowish fatal dose, my look-up chart reckons that they will be vomiting by 11 Dec, losing hair by 18 Dec, and dead by 25 Dec.

Re: Psyx

" Yeah, then they'll only get 'jacked by potential terrorists, rather than amateurs." LOL, can you just imagine the court scene:

"Yes, M'Lud, the accused is the only survivor of the gang that carjacked six trucks they thought carried radioactive Cobalt-60, only to find even worse material with a hal-life of thousands of years - shipments of Twinkies! By the time authorities tracked them to their lair the other members of the gang had died from chronic obesity...."

Moral of this story: Don't handle pellets which give off a pretty blue light.

Re: Moral of this story: Don't handle pellets which give off a pretty blue light.

My alma mater had a small reactor which I visited once, and you could stand above it and look down through the water at the business end. Cherenkov radiation is really very, very beautiful. It's an odd diffuse light that seems to have no source, which is hard to describe. It's not like a torch in mist, there is no "beam" just a glow.

In any event "don't eat the glowing pellets" is good advice for life, more so even than "don't eat the yellow snow".

Morel of the story

Radiation Monitoring

This is why junkyards should be required to check radiation levels in scrap as it is received. Many US Border crossings now have radiation detector tubes on each truck and car lane since the whole 9/11 thing but there is no law requiring scrappers to check and certify each load as it comes in to a junkyard.

The real problem is that once the radioactive material has been smelted in with the rest of the scrap, there is no way to remove the radiation except to let the half life decay process take care of the lethal dose.

That small container of pellets is now melted into TONS of contaminated scrap. Try safely disposing of that.

This used to happen quite often before there were Federal regulations regarding the cradle to grave disposal of radioactive sources. Small hometown Dentists, Doctors and Vets had portable XRay devices and the earliest ones used Cobalt sources instead of electric X Ray tubes. When the Doctor died, no one knew what that heavy thing in the basement was and they got scrapped.

I sold Nuclear Level Gauges for several years (they can "see" liquid through inches of solid steel) and the gentleman that was the radiation officer for the manufacturer told me that he knew of a lost source from a gauge (encapsulated Cesium 137) that was demolished out of a chemical plant that had been used as a boat anchor because it was heavy, had an eyehook on it and was the size of a coffee can. Thankfully the shutter spring had never rotted off it. They found it when it crossed a border in a boat trailer. Had the shutter spring failed, it would have inadvertently dosed hundreds of people. Had it been scrapped and smelted it would be a "small" nuclear disaster.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137 for interesting (and scary) details under incidents

Re: Radiation Monitoring

Have no time to search for the article right this moment, but this is not the first time something similar happened in Mexico. Half of one of their cities is radioactive now as an X-Ray machine was accidentally dumped in a metal scrap yard. The ball bearing rolled all over and got in lots of other equipment/scrap that was recycled for construction.

Re: Radiation Monitoring

At Samut Prakarn, Thailand (not Mexico) a 15.7 TBq (425 Ci) cobalt-60 teletherapy source was lost, attempts were made by some scrap metal workers to recycle the metal. During this time humans were subject to irradation by the source.

It was found that at the edge of the scrap yard the dose rate was about 1 to 10 mSv hr−1. The exact location of the source in the scrap yard was determined using a fluorescent screen which acted as a scintillator. This was held on the end of a long pole. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samut_Prakan_radiation_accident

Re: Radiation Monitoring

X-ray machines generate their radiation by accelerating an electron beam into a target. Whatever the machine was that ended up in that dump, it wasn't x-ray. More likely either a radiotherepy machine or an industrial source. They are used for quality control in metalworking.

Re: Radiation Monitoring

Required here in Australia. The sensors are typically mounted on the input hopper and on the forklifts. Where I live in Port Adelaide there was an incident recently where a forklift sensor alarmed and the quick thinking and selfless operator drove the forklift well away from the factory's buildings before running.

Re: Radiation Monitoring

The story I read said a Radiotherapy Machine. Generally industrial radiation sources must be smaller in order to increase detail of the resultant radiograph. Smaller source=greater detail due to less penumbra (the blurred edge of a shadow). Sources have to be replaced after about 3-5 years as treatment times become too long as the material decays. Cobalt 60 emits Gamma only at 1.02 Million Electron Volt level. At that level there is an effect called "Pair Production", where a Gamma Ray interacts with atoms, which causes the release of 2 electrons (Beta Particles) and 2 Positrons. The Positrons immediately react with 2 electrons, annihilating all 4 but releasing 4 more Gamma rays, but at an energy level too low to cause more "Pair Production".

There was a theft in the US in the mid-70's, where the thief put the source in his shirt pocket after taking it out of it's container. The rule of thumb is that the greatest effect of a radiation dose occurs ~7-10 days post exposure, so these victims are only now peaking.

Re: Radiation Monitoring on your feet?

Heh! Tell me about it. When I was a kid in the early '50s, all the shoe stores (in Quebec) had devices that you could stick your feet into, to see if your delicate foot bones were not cramped in the new shoe.

No? Then, madame, your son has a fine fit!

We kids used to go into the local shoe store on our own, and have fun staring at the flourescence, sometimes wriggling our toes, putting a penny on top of the shoe to see how transparent it was (not very), etc..

One day the government came around and seized all these devices, saying they were, uhh.. unsafe.

mais pourquoi?

C'est pas tes affaires, punk! Sors d'ici!

Sixty years later I still look at my feet to see if they perchance glow in the dark.

Ah well, I guess all the offending ions got pissed and shat out decades ago.

Darwin award

I'd probably agree with the Darwin award as well. Unlike the 1983 incident, it seems that the only dudes who got Chunky Rad Exposure were the robbers themselves, so no innocent bystanders affected. And given the violence involved in truck-jacking (or many gunpoint crimes in Mexico), I hope they die a slow and very painful death.

Re: Darwin award @Wzrd1

> I for one am civilized and would not desire anyone to suffer for any crime, regardless of severity.

A civilized criminal justice system should not involve slow lingering deaths. But if some criminals happen to visit such a death on themselves, I don't see the problem.

We're willing to accept that some dangerous jobs -- on oil rigs, major construction projects, in aerospace, etc, and of course the military -- carry a risk of horrible deaths and crippling injuries and that the people who do these jobs willingly and knowingly accept those risks. We don't wish the pain on them, but we accept that it can happen and we respect their right to take the risk. And they're generally productive members of society doing important jobs that help us. I see no problem with applying basically the same reasoning to criminals, only with a bit less pity as all they're trying to do is harm innocent people for money.

Re: education issue.

Indeed, all radioactive stuff has explicit labels like the all-known fan-shaped one and "MATERIAL RADIOACTIVO" stamped on it. They probably didn't check the cargo until after hearing the news about what exactly they had stolen. And even then they were stupid enough to open the container … that makes them doubly stupid!

Re: education issue.

Re: education issue.

"I'm guessing that they are stupid enough not to KNOW " ignorance is not the same as stupidity. 3rd world poverty stricken upbringing can have disastrous results - severely reduced life expectancy is common.

Re: education issue.

Desperation leads men down many dangerous paths. If they weren't desperate before they stole the truck, they sure as hell were after they stole it. You can't go back at that point and their recently acquired treasure was the only hope they had of escaping the wrath of law enforcement.

They had to inspect it once they got the chance. After all, wouldn't you label your treasure with false warnings to scare off stupid criminals...

Re: education issue.

Warning symbols are really weird things anyway, I collect photos of them. Some are hilarious. Some only make sense if you understand the greater context and some are so far out there as to have the completely opposite effect they were intended to have, they seem to point to something good.

The proposed warnings for the Yucca Mountain waste repository are probably the weirdest I've ever seen. It's got pirates and aliens and all sorts of mixed messages going on and that's in context. What people will make of them in 1000+ years is anyone's guess.